The Social Organization website (About Social Capital / my second book)

Wednesday, 31 May 2017

As always, trends from the past year will continue to play a part in forming 2017’s future. With an ever competitive working landscape, employers are continuously searching for ways to distinguish themselves as a top company to work for, and that comes down to culture. Ranging from health and wellbeing, both mental and physical, to organisational design, to fostering innovation, to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace, to developing social leaders, to being a learning organisation, no company wants to be left behind in securing the best possible candidates. The need to adopt a continuous innovation model will be critical to this in 2017.

I'll be speaking on Thursday 8th June about facilitating group performance: building social organisations, workplaces and technologies:

People have evolved to live in groups and our organisations succeed or fail based mainly upon group performance. However most of our management activities focus on individuals. Shifting focus requires us to incorporate new group structures and to align the design of HR processes as well as workplaces and social / digital technologies with these new groups. I will describe and provide examples of social organisations in which groups provide the basis for effectiveness and competitiveness. The session will also review the role of HR, working in cooperation with other social leaders, in facilitating changes in perspective and management practices. You will learn how to unleash the power of our social brains and social networks to transform organisational performance.

I'm aiming to read and post on all of these books and have already been reading another one, Exceptional Talent from Mervyn Dinnen and Matt Alder.

Despite the title this book focuses on talent management vs talent. That's probably a good thing and I completely agree with Matt and Mervyn that talent is an overused term. So despite the reference to 'exceptional', we 're not looking at a 'high-skilled, high-potential candidate who is in some ways special. Again I think that's useful. M&M suggest this can lead to poor recruitment practice and I'd have loved to hear some examples of this (the book has plenty of case studies of successful approaches - eg one of my recent clients, Bromford Housing - but it can also be useful (and often more fun) to learn from the disasters too. But for me, an even more important reason to avoid a focus on the special ones is that this is vital to create and retain an inclusive environment.

I'd also suggest that the book focuses more on talent engagement rather than capability eg there's a lot of great ideas on employer branding, talent attraction and the candidate experience. Most of this is about the new approaches open to organisations, and perhaps required for exceptional talent management, brought about by advances in technology. I spend quite a bit of time in this area myself but will need to do some further research into Workometry, Life Guides, Papirfly, Quesocial, Rolepoint, Social Referral, Lever, Greenhouse, 4MAT and Punchkick too. It doesn't deal with Google Jobs but that's just an indication of how quickly things are changing in the space, and therefore how important it is to try to keep up with them.

However there's less focus on talent selection, where I think there's been a lot of innovation in technologies and other approaches too. But the biggest gap is talent reward. I'm not blaming M&M for this - as I've suggested previously reward is an area that as yet there's been little innovation taking place. That's going to change. Soon. But it does cover talent onboarding, development, engagement, recognition and retention and again, makes a good case for why and how these need to change. I'd have liked to have seen more on the employee experience as well as the candidate one but in a sense, that's what the whole book is about.

I really liked the sections on social graphs, social sharing and social proof, and if you do too, you should definitely check out The Social Organization. This also make some further suggestions for how talent management processes need to change to respond to the social and technological factors M&M describe.

In summary, it's a great summary of the huge shift many organisations still need to make. Well, actually, I don't think any businesses have made it. But many have still to start. If that applies to you, you need to read this book so that you'll understand some of what you need to change.

As an added incentive, this weekend (26, 27, 28, 29 May) you can get a 50% discount on all of the above books, and all of KP's back catalogue too.

Friday, 19 May 2017

I was up especially early on Tuesday to attend Skillsoft's European conference , mainly to participate in a pre-conference roundtable reviewing new research from David Wilson from Fosway. There were a few quite interesting findings in their report, including that:

87% of HR practitioners see skills gaps continuing to increase. This includes soft skills just as much as it does digital. Leadership skills are seen as slightly less lacking, probably because the people completing the survey saw themselves as leaders.

Learning will therefore continue to increase in importance, becoming the most important part of an employment value proposition.

Most of the roundtable focused on the need for employees to learn more quickly, which I agree is a growing requirement. However I think a still deeper need is to learn more, and more deeply. To me that puts a focus on 'search to learn vs learn to retain' and the evolution of mini into micro and now nano-learning in some doubt. I'd have liked to have raised this point.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, I wasn't there to participate in the roundtable at all but just to report on it (so I suppose I'd better do so). That led to my second main insight from the event which was a reinforcement of the importance of giving control of the learning agenda to the people wanting to learn, and involving them in steering their own learning process. Having a small group of people speaking and another group listening and asking a few questions at the end strikes me as rather bizarre in today's social world.The speaking group also talked quite a bit about the need to give HR credit for the learning that people do as this is not often recognised. Really? I think that as long as HR / Learning acts strategically and effectively it will get the credit it deserves. More metrics may help but they tend not to be the main cause of business concerns about learning, or a main way of dealing with them.Learning and the rest of HR also need to be less siloed, which I completely agree with. However I disagree that using reward is the way to deal with it. Start with organisation design, linked performance objectives, whole group meetings - that will sort the problem in the vast majority of cases.And a lot of the change is being driven by millennials, who value meaning and like taking sabbaticals apparently! (Actually we all value meaning and I took a sabbatical in 1990.)There was nothing wrong with the research but I didn't enjoy my role in the session and so didn't hang around for much of the rest of the conference to see whether 'Percipio' would have much impact on any of the above, but the Twitter stream looked quite positive.

Friday, 12 May 2017

I’m late in providing my summary of Tucana’s
People Analytics World 2017 and have struggled to find a topic that others have
not already written about. However I think one useful perspective may be the
level of variety within analytics at the moment.

This applies firstly to analytical approaches.
Most of the presentations, not unnaturally, focused on quantitative
analytical approaches. My favourite from these case examples was Microsoft’s
use of social traffic metadata to suggest best practice behaviours of the most
effective managers. Becky Thielen and Jeremy Tyers explained that this has
shown, for example, that effective managers maintain larger networks than their
reports:

Employees reporting to managers with large networks are 7% more
engaged and have networks up to 85% larger

Employees with networks 110% larger than their managers are 50% more
likely to be disengaged.

However, I also enjoyed the qualitative
examples, eg Adidas’s analysis of employee experience during key moments
that matter, following the same approach used for the company’s customers, and
applying across HR / management activities, workplace and the digital
workspace. This involved an an automated employee response system providing a
Net Promoter Score, but also open text comments, and textual analytics to help
see summaries and patterns across the business. Stefan Hierl suggested that to
really need to understand what’s going on for people you need to read this
stuff and hence gave leaders access to the comments of their people. He often
talks to leaders about the numbers but you also need an equal focus on the
qualitative side - what’s in the minds of people as this provides a better
feeling for what’s going on. At Adidas, listening to people is a core
competence of HR - we should not outsource this.

Similarly, some of the presentations focused on
very data oriented approaches. I liked Experian’s example of flight risk
modelling, taking data on over 200 employee attributes from multiple sources and
plugging it into Experian’s business modelling tools. This has delivered circa
20 key statistically significant attributes.

But what I really liked about this particular
conference was its heavy focus on a strategy based approach. This started with Alec
Levenson’s session noting that the tasks and behaviors that do not improve
strategy execution vastly outnumber the ones that do. Therefore analytics needs
to start with strategy not data. The point was at least partly supported by Peter
Howes noting that incremental improvement on traditional data reporting
tends not to work that well.

Even more important than this level of variety
about analytics was the variety about people management itself. This includes
different views about the direction of causality between culture and behaviour,
and engagement and performance. Peter Howes asked us whether we are making
decisions about people with the same intellectual rigour as our decisions about
other business factors: Finance, Sales, Production, Supply Chain. Whilst we
don’t even fully understand the role of something as central as engagement this
struck me and at least some other delegates at the conference as a rather
ludicrous suggestion.

I think the amount of variety I have described
above has a couple of important consequences.

1.There
cannot be a single maturity curve which all organisations need to follow. I
much prefer Deloitte’s and 3n Strategy’s approach of identifying different
aspects of analytical maturity each of which can be strong or weak independently
of each other (eg Deloitte’s categories of strategy, people, process,
technology and data).

However, for many organisations, the best
approach may be a combination of the various approaches. For example, Eden
Britt at HSBC presented a heavily quantitative, data orientedapproach, involving, for example, several
smart analytical approaches for providing insight on attrition:

Clustering - which are the areas of high attrition?

Machine learning - who will leave?

Text mining - where will they leave to?

Markov models - when will they leave?

But Britt also emphasised the importance of
deciding upon:

What is the question you are trying to answer?

What is your hypothesis?

What data do you have?

His suggestion when requested to provide yet
more data is to always ask: “How’s that data going to help you make a better
decision or to do something in a different way?”

2. I think the variety in our approaches also
raise broader challenges to emerging or prevailing wisdom:

It means there is limited use for standardised taxonomies. These may
be OK for whether someone has a driving licence but not for eg employee
engagement, or for analytics itself. These may help keep the lights on cheaper
but they also interfere in the search for competitive advantage.

It may also mean there is limited use for benchmarking models and
tools. For example, when comparing cultures, is hierarchical opposite to
delegating?, or professional the opposite to social? - they’re not in my view
of the world.

It means that setting up a professional body for people analytics
would be largely unhelpful. At this point in the evolution of the people
analytics field we need to encourage conversation on different perspectives
rather than to see these constrained.

Thanks to Tucana and all the speakers for
sharing their various approaches.